The Fabliaux

Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.

(Miller's Prologue, I. 3182-84)

Medieval literature includes a great variety of comic tales, in
both prose and verse, and in a variety of more or less distinct
genres. For students of Chaucer, the most important comic genre is
the fabliau (fabliau is the singular, fabliaux the plural). Chaucer's
Miller's tale, Reeve's Tale, Shipman's Tale, Summoner's tale, and the
fragmentary Cook's Tale are all fabliaux, and other tales -- such as
the Merchant's Tale -- show traces of the genre:

"A fabliau is a brief comic tale in verse, usually
scurrilous and often scatological or obscene. The style is simple,
vigorous, and straightforward; the time is the present, and the
settings real, familiar places; the characters are ordinary sorts --
tradesmen, peasants, priests, students, restless wives; the plots are
realistically motivated tricks and ruses. The fabliaux thus present a
lively image of everyday life among the middle and lower classes. Yet
that representation only seems real; life did not run that high in
actual fourteenth-century towns and villages -- it never does -- and
the plots, convincing though they seem, frequently involve incredible
degrees of gullibility in the victims and of ingenuity and sexual
appetite in the trickster-heroes and -heroines.
(The Riverside Chaucer, p. 7.)

The fabliaux was, until Chaucer's time, a genre of French
literature, in which it flourished in the thirteenth century. One of
the minor problems about Chaucer's fabliaux is why he turned to a
genre that had, in effect, been dead for a hundred years. Comic tales
were very popular in Chaucer's time, but the more sophisticated were
almost always in prose (as in the case of Boccaccio's
Decameron). Chaucer had no models in English, and despite the
vivid contemporary tone of Chaucer's fabliaux, they are in some ways
his most Gallic works.

Perhaps Chaucer was attracted to this genre by its most striking
characteristic, its irreverence. This is a common feature of all
forms of comedy, but it is a major and almost invariable element in
the fabliaux:

"The cuckoldings, beatings, and elaborate practical
jokes that are the main concern of the fabliaux are distributed in
accord with a code of "fabliau justice," which does not always
coincide with conventional morality: greed, hypocrisy, and pride are
invariably punished, but so too are old age, mere slow-wittedness,
and, most frequently, the presumption of a husband, especially an old
one, who attempts to guard his wife's chastity. The heroes and
heroines, invariably witty and usually young, are those whom society
ordinarily scorns -- dispossessed intellectuals (lecherous priests,
wayward monks, penniless students), clever peasants, and
enthusiastically unchaste wives. Their victims are usually those whom
society respects --prosperous merchants, hard-working tradesmen,
women foolish enough to try to remain chaste. The fabliau, in short,
is delightfully subversive -- a light-hearted thumbing of the nose at
the dictates of religion, the solid virtues of the citizenry, and the
idealistic pretensions of the aristocracy and its courtly literature,
which the fabliaux frequently parody, though just as frequently they
parody lower-class attempts to adopt courtly behavior."
(The Riverside Chaucer, p. 8.)

Such parody shows the essentially aristocratic outlook of the
writers of the fabliaux; they are merciless upon social climbers (see
Guèrin's Bèrenger of the Long Arse). This is not
surprising, since the authors of the fabliaux were sometimes courtly
writers, such as Jean Bodel, author of number of romances as well as
of the fabliau Gombert and the Two Clerks, and Marie de
France, whose fables contain two fabliaux illustrating the trickery
of women. One assumes that the same audience that enjoyed Marie's
elegant lays of courtly love also enjoyed her fabliaux. Perhaps this
is because the early literature of courtly love shared much of the
irreverence and scorn for conventional morality that characterizes
the fabliaux. For a defense of such morality, one must turn to such
late (fifteenth-century) non-courtly, even anti-courtly works such as
The Wright's Chaste Wife, which looks at the world of the
fabliau from the standpoint of the working classes.